UF’s Carter Conference brings together researchers from 14 universities across U.S.
The University of Florida’s Center for African Studies (CAS) hosted its 40th Gwendolen M. Carter Conference, bringing together the perspectives of Africanist scholars on issues of pressing importance to peoples and societies of Africa. The annual conference is considered the flagship event for the center.
“CAS’s Carter Conference has brought leading thinkers from the United States, Africa and around the world to the University of Florida, to address the most important questions facing Africa and the study of it,” said Miles Larmer, director of the center and professor of history.
The two-day event, held March 27 and 28, explored the newest approaches to the study of African intellectual history and considered the dynamics of knowledge production.
According to Philip Janzen, assistant professor of history and organizer for the event, the purpose of the conference was to refine our approaches to these themes.
“African intellectual history once focused quite narrowly on the nationalist intellectuals of the 1960s, but in more recent years has broadened to include wider histories of thought and belief.” Janzen said. “Regarding knowledge production, we as academics are all involved in the production of knowledge, but in African studies, the history of knowledge production is intertwined with the history of colonialism, and so this conference was an opportunity to excavate and imagine alternative approaches to the production of knowledge.”
Presenters from 14 universities across north America joined UF faculty members to share their vast and deep research and learnings. After each panel presentation, attendees were given the opportunity to probe ideas and engage in discussion. One such discussion on the first day of the conference challenged the very meaning of the word, intellectual.
Janzen cited a definition outlined by former UF History Professor Steven Feierman, as one who engages in “socially recognized organizational, directive, educative, or expressive activities.” Conference participant Sandra Greene, the Stephen and Madeline Anbinder Professor of African History Emerita and a Stephen Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University, noted it is worth asking why and when this definition or question matters. She urged attendees to consider who does it matter to and what work does it do when determining who is and who is not considered an intellectual. Professor of History Nancy Hunt, who was a conference attendee and panelist, suggested that an intellectual was anyone who “wants to think the world, whether on their own, or in a group, whether with pens and paper, or not.”
For over 30 years, the center has honored the legacy of renowned scholar Gwendolen M. Carter, with annual lectures or conferences. The late, distinguished Africanist devoted her career to scholarship and advocacy concerning the politics of inequality and injustice, especially in southern Africa.
“I am deeply grateful to the panelists who have come to Gainesville to share their work,” Janzen said. “The questions and ideas they presented were thought-provoking, generative and timely. And I hope that the attendees found the conference as enriching as I did.”
This year’s Carter Conference was co-sponsored by the departments of History, English, Anthropology, Geography, Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, Languages, Literatures and Cultures, the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere and UF Research.
Learn more about the Center for African Studies here.
